Poe’s implication that the fate of the narrator is somehow linked to that of a beautiful young woman places this tale among an important group of “portraits” —writings about doomed beauty and untimely translation. in an early, quasi-autobiographical poem Poe wrote, “I could not love except where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty's breath” (CW, 1:157). In one sense this declaration expresses an entirely conventional Romantic attitude; Mario Praz notes: “To such an extent were Beauty and Death looked upon as sisters by the Romantics that they became fused into a sort of two-faced herm, filled with corruption and melancholy and fatal in its beauty—a beauty of which the more bitter the taste, the more abundant the enjoyment.”3 But as with premature burial, Poe's insistent figuring of the death of beauty—and the beauty of death—obliges us to look more closely at implicit metaphorical attributes. The poet endeav- ored in “The Philosophy of Composition” to rationalize his obsession with dying young women, calling the theme “the most poetical topic in the world,” as if that assertion explained the brooding evocation of the “lost Lenore” and all of the other doomed ladies in his writing. Poe's biography yields plentiful sources for his preoccupation with cadaverous women and mournful men, and in chapter 4 I discuss the pattern of loss which informs his correspondence. Here | want to situate the death-of-a-beautiful-woman motif in relation to conven- tions of popular literature and to the anthropology of death in the nineteenth century. As noted earlier, Ariés typifies Poe's epoch as “the Age of the Beautiful Death,” a period in which dying became a fetishized spectacle, an elaborately prepared departure; in which the deathbed became a site of beatific intimacy; and in which the corpse became an object of idolatry and commemoration. Barton Levi St. Armand comments on the extensions of this practice: “The loved dead themselves became keepsakes, as advances in embalming and the invention of waterproof tombs and airtight burial cases actually allowed sentimentalists to treat the corpse as a metaphorical gem, treasure, or idol it so often is in the lofty lamentations of mortuary verse."+ As the dead body became an icon, the proliferation of mourning art in nineteenth-century America—with its iconography of urns, plinths, mourners, and weeping willows—helped to feed a melancholy preoccupation with death. This impulse found its con- summation inthe death of young women, especially unmarried wom- en, whose departures from this life seemed to epitomize the beauty of innocent faith,Poe’s response to the cult of mourning and the Beautiful Death defies easy summary. His poetic treatment of dying women indicates that, to a certain extent, he shared the pervasive sentimental view that death intensified female beauty and even brought about a pu- tification of loveliness. Thus for example in “Lenore” he idealized the departed one: The sweet Lenore hath gone before, with Hope that flew beside, Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride— For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies, The life upon her yellow hair, but not within her eyes— ‘The life still there upon her hair, the death upon her eyes. (CW, 1:337] This lyric captures the subtle eroticism of a beauty heightened by the implication that Lenore takes to the grave the charms which she had not yet yielded to her “wild” lover, Guy de Vere. But Poe's emphasis (in I. 12) on the death of “innocence” is also consistent with gift-book evocations of the saintly departure. More frequently in his verses, the beauty of the beloved is an obsessive memory; his speakers recall “the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore” (in “The Raven”) or “the bright eyes/Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.” Poe could argue (in “The Philosophy of Composi- tion”) that the death of a beautiful woman offered the most poetical subject imaginable because that motif conjoined the essential ele- ments of desire: irresistible loveliness and the impossibility of its preservation or recovery. The ephemerality of such beauty ac- counted for its force: unlike the timeless beauty of the work of art (the oval portrait), the loveliness of Poe’s women is doubly evanes-cent, being both an aspect of youth (which is lost daily) and a symptom of illness (which must end in death). This aesthetic no doubt developed in part from the much-noted irony that consump- tion—the all-too-common destroyer in the nineteenth century— actually did enhance physical beauty at an intermediate stage by inducing a feverish glow. In Poe's tales, which deal more directly with the process of dying, fated women seem invariably to grow more beautiful as they approach their last hour. Poe implies that through this insidious transformation, temporal loveliness approaches the perfection of eternal beauty, and theoretically at least the corpse of the dead woman briefly incarnates an ideality. But because death also. entails physiological decay, the beauty of the just-departed contains an element of terror, since the passage of time implies a subsequent and inevitable mutation to loathsomeness. Death discloses its cruel paradoxicality, being both the source of ideal beauty and its destroy- er. Poe could accept the perverse fact that death intensified beauty— he had seen it often enough—but he also saw through the illusion fostered by sentimentalism.